What a long week!

Hi All :)

Finally have a chance to get onto the laptop to say hello. Have just finished three early shifts on the ward and a long day yesterday (was there for 14.5 hours). I now have four days off in a row but have decided to have the ultimate lazy day today followed by three days committed to university work before another week on placement.

Wear good footwear for the standing

My second week on the ward has gone smoothly. I was previously on a care of the elderly ward which is very fast-paced and hard work, and am now on a ward where I find the pace and patient group completely different. Now I am looking after patients who usually go home within a few days of admittance, so there is a lot of focus on organised discharges. There is also a lot of pre-operative and post-operative care, which wasn't present on the last medical ward. I had the opportunity yesterday of following one of the patients from ward to theatre to recovery, which I found interesting. Some people aren't keen on watching procedures, but I find anatomy far easier to learn and understand when it is visually in front of me, so to speak!


Or weekends...

I know a lot of the 'normal' university students have probably just returned to study this week or maybe next...who knows, as unlike a typical university theory based course we do not get the same time off. So I'm afraid no months and months off sorry, just seven official leave weeks scheduled.

Hope the prep for university is coming along well for you all :)

Chat to you next week!
Em x

The (official) start of placement and advice for you :)

Hi All :)

Well after the last week or so of being rather non-productive, I finally have managed to start sitting down and typing. The strange thing is I rather enjoy it when I get into the work, but as soon as I get distracted by something...anything else, the whole day seems to go down the drain. The other day I got to my desk first thing and thought enough of the note writing, research hunting and draft planning, just write. I managed to get 750words done in less than two hours. So it isn't that I can't do it, it's just I find it hard to get in the right frame of mind to just do it. Maybe the pressure of wanting to have it given in to the printers to bind in 4weeks will keep me going!

Sink or swim!?

Yesterday was my first official start of my management placement, and first day working with my main mentor who will be the one to sign me as fit to practice as a nurse in less than 13weeks time. No pressure then! After speaking to her I found her approach very much a 'push students in at the deep end to see if they sink or swim', then when/if any weak areas arise, that is where the focus will be placed. So in my first 7 1/2 hour shift I assisted with a patient drug round and went on a ward round with the consultant in place of my mentor to take notes of what the nursing plan would be for each of the patients visited. I then communicated this information back to the appropriate nurses who were in charge of those patients. In the third year you are expected to start recognising that it wont be long until you graduate, but for your management placement you are expected to start seeing yourself as a qualified nurse. In the next 13weeks I will be expected to run a bay of my own patients, give handovers to other staff at the end of a shift, prioritise my workload and assist newer staff such as other student nurses to demonstrate leadership ability.

My own unofficial advice

If I were to offer any advice of your placements, it would be:

•  really think about what you want out of it before completing your goals/learning objectives in your assessment document within the first week of placement.
• When telephoning your placement area to introduce yourself it is up to you whether you ask to visit the area before starting placement with them. I like to do this so I am aware of basic things such as toilet and changing facilities, discuss shifts and meet your mentor beforehand. I haven't done this on all placements but I have always asked if they recommend any reading beforehand that will enhance my experience.
• Grab every opportunity with both hands. Work with other members of the team such as nurse specialists, physiotherapists and occupational therapists. Anyone really who also work with your patients.
• Everyone's experiences will be different, so don't worry or compare yourself to other students. In my first placement I was still very much used to full time working, and learnt that at first I needed to observe and gain the evidence based information before I could then be competent in caring for my patients. 
• Listen to your mentors but be pro-active about your learning. A lot of it is the more you give, the more you can take away.
•  Don't disregard any member of staff on the ward as less important. I learnt my best hospital bed sheet corners and witnessed some of the most compassionate care from HCA's. I recognised that many of the housekeepers who offer hot drinks and meal options know the patients the best as are not there to offer care but someone to talk to.
• Discharge officers are amazing to gain information from. They start planning patient discharge from admission, so you can really learn a lot by shadowing them.
• Communication between teams is key. Without this everything just slows down completely.
• In the second year I became involved with handovers and ward rounds. It's never to early to start and it means by the third year it wont seem as daunting.
• If a training session pops up, ask if you can go along too. I have recently seen an advert for an hour long dementia awareness training session, but have been lucky to have participated in a vascular access refreshers day, helping with a hospital audit, being part of a team who assess wards through observation and been involved in discussion of improvement of nursing documentation within the hospital. There is no harm in asking and what have you got to lose?

Please feel free to ask anything :)

If there is anything else you want to know, please don't hesitate to ask me, whether about placement or the actual university side of things. I'll be blogging until early August so I'm happy to help :)

Until next time, auvoir!x

PMA! PMA! PMA!

Chime in with me....'PMA!'

Positive Mental Attitude

Sometimes it is so easy to focus on the negatives and 'what if' but sometimes this can take over so much that you look back at the end of a day or week and realise that you've allowed no time for making the situation better.

I felt a bit like this last week. I put too much pressure on my shoulders of getting a draft complete in a short space of time and ended up feeling disappointed in myself. So I went away for a week determined to completely forget about essay's and uni work and placement and switch off (and managed it).

Our hut by the pond

I went down to Somerset for a few nights before smuggling my partner away for a few nights in a random wooden cabin in the middle of a small wooded area with nothing but tree's and a pond in sight. At this point I must remind you that I am only 29years old, and where many would see a heat-filled beach break or night of cocktails and dancing to switch off, this worked a treat for me. On arrival we were driven across a boggy field by the farmer (I got to sit on the back of the pick up in the rain on the way back and it made me feel like a very happy child!). We arrived at the cabin with mud splashes up and past our wellies and waterproofs but got to our little hut with a veranda to sit and watch the world go by and a single gas hob and woodburner inside. For those who need their mobiles-there was barely any signal and no electricity in the hut, so we relied on candle light and torches in the evenings. We lived off a pot of stew and they had built a toilet outside that required a 2minute walk through the wood...something I found difficult to adjust to at night when I heard the bushes rustling but not being able to see anything there (slight horror filmish!).

Anyway...he enjoyed it too and it was nice to just be so relaxed and not worry about anything other than topping up the burner with wood and when the candles would burn down. When we made it back to civilisation we continued the relaxation and had six hours of just reading a book (not one that was needed to be read for nursing either!) and catching the sunshine.

On the train back yesterday I did a little reflecting and felt a slow familiar panic rising that was the same sensation as I had felt last week when thinking about my university work. Hopeless. But then after a small consumption of caffeine and sugar I tried to figure out a new technique to get back into my writing...and this is what I tried this morning.

I figured that during my written exam a few weeks ago I wrote around 11pages of answers in the two hour period and realised if I can write that much under pressure, how could I sit in front of my laptop for 5days and write a few hundred words? So this morning I had Word open ready for 9pm and set my phone timer for 2hrs. During this time I had my phone on flight-mode and had all webpages closed excluding a link to a policy I needed for my project. I wasn't allowed to leave my desk for anything other than bathroom break and had a bottle of water at the desk. No distractions. And guess what? I managed around 600words. Success!

I realised then that if my head is not into a piece of work, assigning day after day to be sat in front of it will just feel like a life sentence with nothing greener on the other side. I also realise that I work less productively in the afternoons so rather than online shopping to pass the time like last week (can't afford it if I want to buy a car in summer!) then I could instead do things like this blog or little bits of research towards the project.

Odie says PMA!

So that is me for this week...still waiting for my exam results but to be fair they are allowed up to four weeks to mark our work before releasing grades and with one hundred or so students to mark with 5-15pages to mark for each person, they'll probably take the maximum time! So may have some news on that next week. I have my official start of placement next week starting on Tuesday so will be my final ever countdown...all of my work and placement will be complete in 12weeks time! 
 
 
Hope things are ok in your world!

Em x

PMA!

Fairwell to a tedious week...hello time off!

Evening All!

Well I would love to say that my planned study week went according to plan, but unfortunately it was quite the opposite!

I have spent five days staring at my laptop hoping for the words to come. I have a plan of the work, pages of notes, extracts from books and a collection of policies and guidelines but still I have not been able to write anything other than an introduction and some notes as to what I will roughly be writing about.

I was so determined to have a draft completed by today but sadly things don't always go to plan. But all I can do is accept that I will need to put more hours in when I get back next week. I'm setting off to visit my partner tomorrow in Somerset (he has probably forgotten who I am after 5weeks apart!). A weekend of cooking and a trip away should help me to switch off from my study!

I managed to get out for a training walk today in prep for our Hadrian's Wall trek...the idea of it being only 5weeks until we walk 26miles with many ups and downs is quite worrying...others seem to be fitting in two or three 12mile walks a week so we are a little (a lot) behind!


Anyway, it has unfortunately been a dull week in terms of updating you, so I apologise! I'm assuming that the exam results will be back in the following few weeks so will keep you posted.

I hope you have had a far more interesting week than me! Hope life is treating you well :)

Em x